Meet Ore Phillips: Investing in the Future of AI in Accounting

AI is quickly changing our world of finance and accounting. We could spend a lot of time talking about it, but we’d rather start doing the work.

At Cox Consulting Network (CCN), our approach to AI starts in the same place our business always has: with people. We believe experienced finance and accounting professionals become more valuable when they have better tools, stronger support, and a network where they can keep learning.

So we’re investing in exactly that.

One of the first applications of that commitment is the addition of Ore Phillips, our AI Practice Leader.

Ore brings more than 20 years of experience in enterprise finance transformation, including time as a PwC Director and Chief Compliance Officer at Bitwave. He has led finance and technology programs across industries and delivered more than 50 enterprise implementations.

But we’re not simply excited about adding “AI” to somebody’s title; we’re most excited about what he is here to help us build.

AI should extend expertise, not replace it

We’re finance and accounting people first.

We aren’t trying to become an “AI-first” company, and we don’t believe adopting new technology suddenly makes human expertise less important.

With AI, we see an opportunity to give experienced professionals more leverage. AI can help with research, first drafts, repetitive preparation, quality checks, and pieces of a process that consume time without requiring someone’s highest level of judgment.

The professional still owns the work.

That means knowing when an answer doesn’t look right. It means checking the source. It means understanding the accounting behind the output. And it means being the person willing to put your name behind the final result.

That is why our investment in AI is really an investment in our consultants.

“AI can multiply your domain expertise.” — Ore Phillips

We’re starting with practical wins

We’re not waiting until we have a big AI transformation methodology neatly packaged in a binder.

Our approach right now is much more practical: learn what people are already doing, find the applications that actually help, test them against real finance and accounting work, and share what holds up.

We’re already seeing examples across the network.

One consultant used AI as part of a recurring duplicate-payment check that surfaced roughly $34,000 before the payment went out. Another cut the first draft of a deal memo from more than four hours to around 30 minutes. In technical accounting, AI has helped compress days of research into hours while the consultant continues to verify the citations and own the conclusion.

Those are the kinds of wins we care about.

Building the next layer

Ore is already helping turn our philosophy into something our consultants can actually use.

He’s identifying and testing practical applications, capturing what works, and developing learning resources and curriculum. We’re creating ways for consultants to learn from one another rather than on their own.

Over time, we want the best lessons from that work to become shared knowledge across our network, and eventually something we can share more broadly with the finance and accounting profession.

“We’re all in. We’ve made the investment, we’re continuing to make the investment, and we know how important this is to our clients.” — Andy Cox, CEO, Cox Consulting Network

Join the AI Accounting Forum

One of the biggest pieces Ore is helping build right now is the AI Accounting Forum.

CCN created the Forum as a place where finance and accounting practitioners can connect, learn, and compare notes on what they are actually doing with AI.

The community is live, and its first event took place in September 2026, with practitioners demonstrating real-world AI applications they use in finance and accounting.

The Forum will continue to grow through events, demonstrations, discussions, shared resources, and contributions from the practitioners themselves.

If you work in finance or accounting and want to learn alongside other people navigating the same changes, we’d love to have you join the online community or attend our next event.

Join the AI Accounting Forum →

We’re still people-first

The tools will change (quickly!), but our underlying approach won’t.

We want great finance and accounting professionals to have the support they need to keep growing with the profession. We want clients to benefit from stronger, more capable talent. And we want to create a network where people can learn from each other instead of navigating a major shift alone.

Stay tuned for more to come.